Review of The Drop

by Michael
Engelbrecht

From Jazzthetik, September 1997,
kindly translated, typed and supplied by
Bommel
by kind permission of Michael Engelbrecht.

"Imagine someone of a distant
planet asked you to describe modern jazz. Imagine them trying to play it
after forgetting most of what you said. Welcome to The Drop!"

Brian Eno is playing with forgetting,
and he makes a jazz record, which, of course, isn't one. Since the music
is coming out of forgetting. Tradition is an old man with a dead
suitcase full of music. Remembering is the the biggest error of the
model pupil. In jazz, enough prisoners of good taste are running around
in circles flogging memories. If only they could forget, if only the
first blown sound would become an adventure again. The first sound out
of a saxophone, out of a Steinway grand piano, out of a DX-7, out of a
cheap Casio!

Why is this album a masterpiece?
Because memory consists of nothing but torn threads. The puppet player
accompanies imaginary sound figures through empty spaces. Only rubble
interpuctuates the emptiness. Rubble is stranded memories, stripped of
their old form, melodic signatures, rhythmic skeletons. Even rhythmic
skeletons can dance! And Brian Eno once whistled IN A SILENT WAY. He
loved the labyrinthine sound sculptures of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He
even once entitled one of his compositions ZAWINUL. And this sounds
through from very far away. Like Chinese whispers in the Internet. The
parallels vanish in a pure blue space. Anybody who keeps heaven out of
the music, will direct a laboratory experiment. Melodic motives move in
delicate zigzag lines. Vague and daring. All of a sudden, what the
intellect perceives as an unfinished sound sketch, the sentiment finds
perfect. Not one note too few!

It starts with an arabic essence: a
note is bent, flexed, all a question of flying skills. Out of static
grooves, melodic motives bubble like fountains. Where to go? Into the
uncertain! Into the abstraction of memory! Strangely factual, at the
same time strangely enthusiastic. Further parallels: Eno likes Fela Kuti
and hears again and again the bass lines out of the music of this
Nigerian ensemble, which are at the same time melodic and percussive and
which loose all of their sense when the surrounding instruments cease.
Eno was in contact with Harmonia and Cluster for some time: to let a
chord sustain over two bars and modulate the constant soft decay ad
infinitum, this variety of giddiness from fairs and carousels. And, of
course, theplaying with jazz, only materializing above the beats, in the
improvisations and well-dosed samples: a drum roll gets driven to the
horizon by an unreal echo, a precious sound of a grand piano gets
smuggled into the completely-electronic.

The Drop presents complex
emptied music, miles apart from Drum & Bass and Post-Jungle and
Pre-Shuckle and Dream-Stip and Illbient and Clone Cool. This music is a
stroke of luck, outwitting in the modern ding-a-ling machine sound and
easy listening. One could nearly think this CD is falling out of time a
little bit. The museum guards of jazz have clapped-out. Now fork-lift
truck drivers come into the picture. In their white boxes, heaven is
living.